Microsoft "Data Hub," a private, self-service DataMarket for your internal data and users, but in the cloud...

a cloudy place - Free Private Data from Silos for Internal Use with Microsoft CodeName “Data Hub”

"...

Create a Private Self-Service DataMarket for Your Organization’s Data with Microsoft Codename “Data Hub”

IT departments of medium and large enterprises amass large amounts of data about the operations of their organizations, as well as detailed information on customers, suppliers, and other business partners. Historically, this information has been accumulated and analyzed for specific purposes and then archived or discarded. In this era of increasing “big data” consciousness, C-level executives expect analysis of internally generated data to deliver added business value, especially competitive advantage. A major problem is that information workers spend too much time searching for data and not enough time analyzing it for actionable insights with tools they’re accustomed to using—usually Excel.

To overcome these data distribution, discovery, and curation problems, Microsoft’s SQL Azure Labs team leveraged the public DataMarket investment to create Codename “Data Hub” as an early concept of a value-added service that enables IT organizations to provision and manage their own private DataMarket. Like the public DataMarket, Microsoft hosts the Data Hub preview on Windows Azure with SQL Azure tables as the data source at http://YourHubName.clouddatahub.net. Data Hub is a private preview, so you must request an invitation by completing a form on the Codename “Data Hub” Welcome page, wait for an e-mail with a token and instructions for its redemption. The first step is to specify the Firewall Rules for the IP range of your Data Hub’s users (see Figure 2.)

..."

Microsoft Codename "Data Hub"

An Online Service for Data Discovery, Distribution and Curation

Information drives today’s business environment. Enable your knowledge workers to spend less time searching for the data they need and more time analyzing and sharing it. Create your own enterprise "Data Hub" and empower your knowledge workers to more efficiently get the information you need to drive your business to the next level.

Give your company the competitive advantage it needs with "Data Hub".

"Data Hub" enables:

• Easy Publication and Distribution of Data

  "Data Hub" enables quick and easy publication by data owners of their data sets and data artifacts such as reports, templates, models and visualizations.

• Seamless Data Discovery and Consumption

  Knowledge workers can easily search the "Data Hub" to discover and consume cleansed and certified enterprise data as well as community driven data. Annotations, semantics, and visualizations make the data useful and relevant. "Data Hub" will also support social collaboration.

• Flexible Data Management and Monitoring

  IT can easily provision a "Data Hub", manage its content and access permissions. Usage telemetry enables IT to monitor consumption.

This Lab is the first milestone of the "Data Hub" roadmap.

Please register so that we can notify you when the lab is ready!

...

Microsoft Codename "Data Hub"

Data drives your business. Having the right data at the right time gives you and your business a competitive advantage. Often the data you need already exists within your enterprise. You just need to find it. "Data Hub" enables your enterprise to curate and publish its data on a private data marketplace, making it easy to discover and leverage.

Microsoft Codena`me "Data Hub"

Welcome to the Microsoft Codename “Data Hub” Lab Preview. Codename “Data Hub” is a Windows® Azure™ service that enables you to create and manage a private Marketplace for your company data. A private Marketplace empowers your workers by enabling them to quickly discover, publish and consume your valuable corporate data. If you subscribe to public data offerings on the Windows Azure Marketplace you can federate those subscriptions, also making them available throughout your corporation.

I think was announced a while ago, but it didn't click with me until I saw it in the above a cloudy place. My initial response was, "zomg, there's no way 'we' are going to post our data to the cloud..." Then I sat back and thought, "That's silly... why not? Let's skip over the knee-jerk and think about this a little more."

I love the idea of not having to invent our own data hub (warehouse/mart/etc) infrastructure. The thing that really grabbed me was the market side of this, that these are the pieces to free your internal data for your internal users, without adding tons of hardware/networking/etc. In IT we have lots of "data". In the business we have lots of domain knowledge. I'm thinking this could be a cool way to merge the two, to turn that data into information, knowledge and maybe even wisdom...